Posts Tagged ‘Copywriting’

Quality product descriptions can transform e-commerce conversion rates — it's common to see increases of 30-100%. As well as converting more visitors, search traffic increases drastically when unique copy is written for each product. Most online retailers use manufacturers' copy or rely solely on images to sell products. They then use inadequate copy elsewhere on their site and fail to achieve a consistent tone to persuade their audience. This creates a compelling opportunity for savvy retailers: by writing quality e-commerce copy you will create a unique competitive advantage.

Essentially, your copy must achieve two goals — establish trust and convince visitors that your product is right for them. Potential customers cannot see or touch the product since it's not physically there in front of them. This is why it’s important that your copy anticipates the needs of your visitors while convincing them that your company can be trusted to provide excellent products. Persuasion and creating trust are difficult things to do with words alone; yet, they are still achievable.

Good design speaks for itself, right? Unfortunately, that is rarely the case. Most of us don’t have the privilege of designing for ourselves; we design for clients, clients who have their own taste and ideas, clients who ultimately need to be persuaded on why we’ve made certain decisions. Good design doesn’t speak for itself; it needs an advocate.

This article examines both why design requires justification and how you can go about providing it in a way that is clear and understandable. While we'll focus on visual design, the principles described here are applicable to any creative process or endeavor. Indeed, we learned most of these lessons while presenting Web interfaces and prototypes to clients, which took place after the visual designs had been agreed on.

Effective writing skills are to a writer what petrol is to a car. Like the petrol and car relationship, without solid skills writers cannot move ahead. These skills don’t come overnight, and they require patience and determination. You have to work smart and hard to acquire them. Only with experience, you can enter the realm of effective, always-in-demand writers.

Of course, effective writing requires a good command of the language in which you write or want to write. Once you have that command, you need to learn some tips and tricks so that you can have an edge over others in this hard-to-succeed world of writers. There are some gifted writers, granted. But gifted writers also need to polish their skills frequently in order to stay ahead of competition and earn their livelihood.

We collected over 50 useful and practical tools and resources that will help you to improve your writing skills. You will find copywriting blogs, dictionaries, references, classes, articles, tools as well as related articles from other blogs. Something is missing? Please let us know in the comments to this post!

Link baiting is not evil. Although some bloggers tend to go beyond any ethical considerations in their attempts to enforce as many reciprocal links as possible, the term itself stands for a completely organic nature of the Web - actually, something that has already been here for a while. Traditional link building, used to be bounded with Search Engine Optimization, is now being extended with the aspect of so-called Social Media Optimization - with Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Del.icio.us & Co. on the bandwagon. Driving traffic to your site has become easier, but requires through-out strategies and understanding some basic rules of useful content and effective content marketing.

The term 'linkbaiting' doesn't necessarily reflect this aspect of organic growth on the Web; in fact, as suggested by Darren Rowse, its negative connotations rather expose the idea of clever tricks, traps, deceptions or even frauds, which are supposed to manipulate content editors in linking, even if they don't really want to.

Mostly that's not what link baiting is really about. Instead, Linkbaiting is about gaining reputation, finding your niche, writing useful and creative content, presenting your ideas, publishing them on the Web and finding people who might actually use them. You won't find your readers if you concentrate on building links; you will be able to build links organically if you concentrate on your readers. Moreover, you can gain reputation if and only if you focus on your readers. This is one of the basic principles of successful blogging.

Let's take a look at non-trivial and most effective rules, principles, techniques, strategies, methods, examples and resources related to link baiting. Among other things this overview will cover the aspect of effective copy writing as well. Golden rules of linkbaiting - in a comprehensive overview.

SmashingConf isn't the eighth wonder of the world, but we are pretty close. Join us at SmashingConf Oxford on March 16–19 or meet us at the shores of Santa Monica for SmashingConf LA on April 27–30. You won't be disappointed.